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THE 



WIRE 


PAT METHENY 

The Guitarman 
reflects 


STEVE MARTLAND 

Putting the Classics 
in their place 


ARRESTED 

DEVELOPMENT 

Agrarian Rap 
for the future 


JIMMY 

WITHERSPOON 



EAST 


WE CELEBRATE THE ASIAN 
SOUND WORLDWIDE, FROM 
SUNS OF ARQA TO TRILOK GURTU, 
FROM JOI TO SHONEN KNIFE 


THE 1992 WIRE T-SHIRT: OFFER INSIDE 















s I Of 


IN 



The U.K.'s major showcase for all that's 
happening in jazz and new music today 
the 1992 festival features some of the 
key figures in the British scene, including: 

MIKE WESTBROOK ORCHESTRA 
UNA SOLA VOZ 

-international collaboration with 
TREVOR WATTS and 30 members of 
TEATRO NEGRO de BARLOVENTO 
from Venezuela 


DEDICATION ORCHESTRA 
a tribute to Chris McGregor and Dudu Pulcwana 


Sun 6th 
1992 


BAIANESCU QUARTET 
with John Surman, Orphy Robinson, 
Keith and Julie Tippett 


PYROTECHNICS 

with the bands of 
Django Bates, Sylvan Richardson and Orphy Robinson 

BILL BRUFORD'S EARTHWORKS 

& two great international groups: 

SHANKAR with NANA VASCONCELOS 
and ANDY SHEPPARD 
MARILYN CRISPELL and EDDIE PREVOST 

plus many many more 


]the Hawth Centre Crawley on: 0293 553 636 



mi east. 



4 Now’s The Time All the news plus Arrested 
Development, Rickey Woodard 

12 Pat Metheny The country boy on the town with John 
Fordham 

16 The Wire Party Ten Years Old! And here’s the evidence! 

18 Ideas Of East Hopey Glass examines fragments of a 

fantasy 

24 Suns Of Arqa Jonathan Romney seeks out the mysterious 

Mancunian-Oriental dubmasters 

28 T rilok Gurtu The percussionist hammers things out with 

Kenny Mathieson 

30 Ikue Mori/Catherine Jauniaux Improvising women 
from different worlds play together forJohn Corbett 

34 The Far East Side Band Andrew Pothecary meets the 
three wise Asian-Americans of Gotham 

38 Joi Kodwo Eshun salutes the rise of Asian Deep House 

40 The Charts They’re listing! They’re listing! (What a 
terrible joke!) 

42 Jimmy Witherspoon The bluesman talks Jazz with 
Brian Priestley 

44 Invisible Jukebox Steve Martland tested by Louise Gray 

46 Soundcheck The records that count, in large amounts 

61 The Wire Index Your guide to our past 

67 Subscribe And untold riches - well, a free CD - will be 





Founder Anthony Wood 


72 The Classifieds Let your fingers do the walking 
14 The Write Place Grace us with your pressure 

73 The T-Shirt This year’s look! Don’t miss out! 







NOW’S 

THE TIME presents 

THE NEWS SECTION 



4SWIRE 




NOW’S 
THE TIME 



55WIRF 



NOW’S 

THE TIME presents 


J" TONIGHT 

BELFAST Crescent Arts 
Centre (0232 242 338): 

Eugene Chadbourne & 

Orchestra Murphy (6). 

BRECON Market Hall (0874 
625 557): Clark Tracey, 

Courtney Pine (15); Pat 

Holland (16); Christ College 
(0874625 557): Michael 
Petrucciani Trio (14); Johnny 
Griffin Qt (15); Julian 
Arguelles Qt (15); Guildhall 

Vasconcelos (14); Bheki 
Mseleku (14); Roy Hargrove 
(15); Rural Wales Bandstand 
(0874 625 557): Irakere (16). 
BRIGHTON Richmond 
Hotel (0273 680 611): Eugene ' 
Chadbourne, Orchestra 
Murphy (19). 

CAMBRIDGE Cherry Hinton 
Hall (0223 463 347): Buddy 
Guy (1). 

CORK Triskell Arts Centre 
(010 353 2196 5011): Eugene 
Chadbourne, Orchestra 
Murphy (4). 

DARTINGTON Arts Centre 
(0803 863073): Keith Tippett 
& Paul Dunmall (2). 
EDINBURGH Usher Hall: 
Stephane Grappelli (8); British 

Shapiro (11); Pat Metheny/ 

Dave Holland/Roy Haynes 
(12); Queen’s Hall (031 668 
2019): Andy Sheppard’s In Co- 

LEICESTER Phoenix Arts 
Centre (0533 554 854): 
Eduardo Niebla & Antonio 
Fordone (2). 

YORK Arts Centre (0904 627 
129): Eugene Chadbourne, 


& around LONDON 

BARBICAN EC2 (071 638 
London Symphony Orchestra 


(2); Stephane Grappelli & Trio 

(23). Foyer; Jazz A belles 0); 
Alan Skidmore Qt (2); Alec 
Dankworth ‘Acoustic Tamba’ 
(6); The Kimbara Brothers (8); 
Tommy Chase At (9); Jules 
Ruben Jazz/Latin Trio (14); 
Roger Beaujolais (17); Stacey 
Kent Trio (22). 

BROADGATE ARENA EC2 
(071 588 6565): Kenny Ball & 
His Jazzmen (10); Georgie 

Hexad (12); Norma Winstone 
& Friends (13); Mike 
Westbrook (14). 

BULL’S HEAD, Barnes (do 
081 995 7613): Eduardo 
Niebla & Antonio Fordone (3). 
JAZZ CAFE NW1 (071 284 
4358): Tim Whitehead (1); 
Larry Coryell (4-6); Steve 
Williamson (7-8); 


John Taylor’s Azimuth with 
Kenny Wheeler and Norma 

(15); Lee Konitz with Peggy 
Stern, Mick Hutton and Steve 
Arguelles (18-20); Noel 
McKoy (21); Microgroove (22); 
Julian Arguelles (25). 

JAZZ RUMOURS, N 16(081 
254 6198): John Stevens & 
Derek Bailey (1); Maggie 

Roger Turner & Dave Tucker 
(14); Osmosis plus Howard 
Riley (21); Jim Dvorak, Mark 

ORIGINAL JAZZ CAFE, N16 

(071 3594936): Iain Ballamy 
(July 31); Ed Jones (7, 14). 

606 CLUB (071 352 5953): 
Tina May Quartet (9). 
VORTEX (071 254 6516): 


ZIGGY’S, NW1 (do 081 343 
0542): Tony Smith (2);Josie 
Frater (9); Kelvin Christian 
(16); Jim Mullen (30). 

inclusion in the September 


AN EDITOR S IDEA 

future. Where the former Soviet Union’s cultural apparatus — 
Musicians’ Union, single state-run record company Melodya - 
at a stroke marginalised dissent and creativity, the ructions 
over America’s National Endowment of the Arts over the last 

uncontroversially. The Christian Right (in the unlovely shape 
of Senator Jesse Helms) is ultimately embarked on the same 

war against alien thinking, spiritual pollution, and art that 
questions the health of the status quo, the state religion. 

taxpayers pay good money to people who throw it back - along 
with their most cherished beliefs - in their face? Care is thus 

odds. 

music, here in the UK. The recent fuss over the National 
Music Syllabus was also about money and separation - the 
state can no longer afford to encourage the direct involvement 
of children in any music that requires the nurturing of craft (if 
they turn to it, it’ll be in their own time). And then there’s 
Radio Three under Nicholas Kenyon’s four-month-old regime. 

Here at The Wire we have much sympathy with him (we 
ought to declare our interest: we have regular writers who are 
also occasional R3 broadcasters). Shaking things up, easing 

perceived by some as part of a (wider) narrowing — wherein the 
specialist outlet simply starts to imitate its lowest-common- 
denominator neighbours. We acknowledge that to some, 
throwing doors open will always go hand in hand with hiding 
your valuables in deep, dark cupboards. 

The problems of the question of state-funded cultural 
patronage remain: who decides to back what, and why. We 
can sit back and enjoy Kenyon repeating the sneers his 
predecessor John Drummond directed at now-lapsed fake punk 
Nigel Kennedy. But we had as much fun watching this 
spike-topped clown proving that Classical Culture’s rituals are 

to pretend you’re talking to (62% men, 72% over 45, 73% 
ABC1 social class: the station that serves up Dead White 
Males for aging ditto, some of our writers would certainly be 
tempted to say: if Kenyon’s ending that, well, about time too). 
How he performed his Brahms or his Vivaldi is not really even 

located elsewhere. As long as difficult, grownup music is 
refused the opportunity to engage properly with such foolish¬ 
ness - which you can call Pop, or else the Real World - it’s put 
into covert alliance with Helms, Zhdanov and the rest. ■ 


6*WIRE 



m sum! SLAM! 

SATJZA is the Numero Uno tequila in Mexico, and you can win 
some! For three generations Sauza have distilled superb tequilas and 
now they have teamed up with The VTire to offer readers the chance to 
win three bottles of Sauza’s finest tequila, Tres Generaciones. Six 
runners up will win a full-colour SAUZA/!f/>c t-shirt. Simply 
answer the questions below, and send them to us by 19 August 
1992. 


From what plant 
is tequila made? 

A. The Blue Agave 

B. The Cactus 

C. The Mexican Jumping 
Bean plant. 


Tequila is made from plants 
grown around 
what Mexican town? 

A. Tijuana 

B. Tequila 

C. Arriba A 



The Wire is running this C( 

A. For philanthropic reasons 

B. To fill a page in the magazine 

C. Because Sauza gave them so much beer at 

the 10th Anniversary Party that they don’t know 
where they are or what they're doing 


Complete the following phrase: 

Mexican music 


s marvellous because . . . 


And send the whole lot on a postcard to: Roshmi Khasnavis 
THE TEQUILA SLAMMER The Wire 
Namara House 
45/46 Poland Street 
London W1V 3DF 


3 SAUZA is Mexico's 
favourite Tequila 
because of 

A. Three generations of 
quality and tradition 

B. Sauza meaning ‘Good 
Evening’ in Spanish, 
and Mexican barmen 
serving it by mistake. 

C. Its hallucinogenic 
properties 



7SWIRE 





NOW’S 

THE TIME presents 



? SWIRE 




group’s DJ Headliner, in a London hotel lounge, "is not to be like 
groups from New York, but to create an image specifically for the 
South, and we’ve done a fine job.” Rapper/sage Speech, the beguiling 

the up-side of Southern life on his grandparents’ farm in Ripley, 
Tennessee. His mysterious newspaper column “Twentieth Century 
African”, quotes from which gave record company press releases as 

Community Journal , a small local paper owned by his parents. 

Rap’s sense of place, in some ways its most vital ingredient, has 
always been based, quite properly, on myth. Just as it didn’t matter 
too much in the long run which punk rockers could be entirely 

The music comes from the place where we, and they, want it to come 
from. If Arrested Development weren’t so manifestly unbothered by, 
even happy to encourage, the hay-seed hyperbole, it would be slightly 
insulting. These people did not meet at a barn-dance. The starting 



BY BEN THOMPSON 














NOW’S 

THE TIME presents 

RICKEY WOODARD: Saxophone 



/OSWIRE 




At Jack Daniel’s Distillery, Sturdy 
Barrelmen And Charred Oak Barrels Are A Big 
Part Of Our Whiskeys Smoothness. 


Actually, Jack Daniel’s is uncommonly smooth before it 
goes into the oak. You see, every drop has been seeped through 
vats of hard maple charcoal prior to aging. Any rough edges 
are removed right here. Then, barrelmen make sure more 
smoothing occurs inside the wood. Naturally, the whole 
process takes a lot of time. And a lot of lifting. But, we 
believe, the results are worth all our barrelmen’s efforts. 


SMOOTH SIPPIN’ TENNESSEE WHISKEY 




GETTING THINGS 

DOWN 

PAT 

Mr Metheny talks to John Fordham about lost love, 
classic jazz and his latest LP release. 
Justin Quick prayed for (shutter) release. 


15th anniversary tour of Japan this month. But just to remind 
the world that the amiable, song-like, country-jazz he became 
famous for is by no means all he does, the UK will get two 
gigs this summer (Edinburgh and Brecon) from the scorching 
bebop trio that features Metheny the Wes Montgomery fan, 
with the ferocious assistance of Dave Holland on bass and Roy 
Haynes on drums. 

Metheny has sometimes been sniffed at by jazz fans for 
veering too close to elevator-music for comfort, but a Metheny 
tune is always recognisable and the guitar skills that made him 

tingle. He used jazz inflection and spontaneity as the variation 
on a musical personality raised in the 60s and 70s on the 
Beatles and Hendrix, developing through practice on a 
battered stringbox on a Missouri backporch with the Ozarks 

technological sophistication over the years, he’s never lost the 
dusty-jeans, shit-kicking country-boy casualness, the syncla- 
vier capturing the sound of people whistling on sidewalks, 
accordions at hoe-downs, harmonicas playing blues. 

American atmosphere has changed. At 37, he’s produced his 
minutes long and suggesting finally and ruefully that he’s 


72 SWIRE 



13 SWIRE 



PAX METHENY 


realised he’s mortal. Originally made by Metheny alone with 
the synclavier, then augmented here and there by Lyle Mays, 
Nana Vasconcelos, Toots Thielemans and the London conduc¬ 
tor and orchestrator Jeremy Lubbock with a string-section, 
this disc certainly includes the problematic bits of Metheny as 
well as the disingenuous charm - it's hurt-romantic to the 
point of Hollywood Kleenexville at times, and some of the 
most typical Metheny pieces sound like music you’ve heard a 
lot of times before, with their even legato lilt, contoured 
melody lines and pop-song chords. But at least half of it also 
features both his best writing and guitar playing in years. 


with that deep breath, maybe almost a prayer kind of vibe you 
feel with a new relationship, then going through the process of 
learning about it, expanding and growing and it changes and 
then it ends, you know. The record follows that curve, in an 
abstract way. I suppose people who write songs and have words 
would get much more specific about it, but I’m reluctant to go 
into too much detail over what it was about for me, because 
one of the great things about instrumental music - whether 
classical or jazz or what - is that it allows people to find their 
own stories in it. But I would definitely agree it’s probably the 
saddest record I’ve made.” 


Secret Story came from two pieces on the session 
that were written for the Montreal Ballet in 1988, one an 
untypically convoluted melody with odd chord movements 
called “Antonia”, the other a many-layered sound-effects piece 
(“The Truth Will Always Be”) that Metheny now regards as 
the single richest and most accurate theme he’s ever written 
about the sounds that have coloured his life. 

“I did have a sense that those pieces were the end of 
something,” Metheny says. “I didn’t know what, but I knew 
some other music would have to lead to them. So I started 
working backwards from there. And it turned out to be the 
longest I’ve ever worked on any single thing in my life. 

“On another level, though, it kind of started with ‘As Falls 
Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls’, which is the only other 
record I’ve made like this which has a narrative form to it. I 
also wanted to have a record that was like an expansion sonically 
of everything I’d been working on. More and more I find that 
the things I really like that I keep coming back to, is music 
you can check out melodically, or harmonically, or in terms of 

headphones, or at a distance. Music that was long and wide 

Simplicity from complex hardware has always been a shrewd 
Metheny skill. On the beautiful “Antonia”, he gets its eerie 
accordion-like sound by sampling a soprano sax and an arco 
bass playing in a very high register, with many different 
performances of each note layered on top of it. The sound came 
first, he says, and inspired the distinctive chord pattern and 
zigzagging melodic movement of the tune. But one result is 
that Secret Story will be hard to repeat live, though Metheny 
intends to try on a US tour in the autumn. 

"When I make records I’m always half thinking, ‘How am I 
going to do this live?’ And since I do spend so much of my 


performing musician, I wanted the experience c 
record where that was not an issue at all. But I guess the real 
reason for it is that the record parallels a romantic chapter of 
my life, and it’s a shape that I’ve seen a few times, starting out 


Since a growing part of Metheny’s life is the trio with 
Holland and Haynes that he calls “one of my favourite 
situations to play in, ever”, was such a written and produced 
work as Secret Story an improvisational problem? 

“I wouldn’t characterise this record as jazz at all,” Metheny 
says, “but ironically it’s got what I think of as some of my best 
improvising ever on record. It was like a point where the line 
between composition and improvisation became very blurred, 
though it was definitely melody-solo-melody. It’s just that 
what happened in the solo had to be emotionally at the same 
level that the tunes were. 

“I have to get a little bit more specific at this point in the 
discussion maybe. At the point I had to do the solos. I’d just 
broken up with a girl and that’s basically the vibe of the whole 
thing. It was very very difficult for me to get to the point of 
playing, because all this music to me was associated with this 
person, and I had to face it and go into the studio and actually 
do it. Recording can result in a kind of distance, it does for 
most musicians, between you and your thing. It becomes a 
little bit analytical whether you want it to or not, because 
there’s that thing in the back of your mind where you know 
you can do it again if you have to. 

“The difference for me this time was that there was no 
simulation needed, it wasn’t one of those attempts to repeat 
that gig you played in Paris or London when you know you 
played really well. I was so deeply involved in the emotions 
that were required for this record that it was very difficult to 
do the solos at all. It was incredibly painful and what you hear 
on the record is really the shit. This is the most produced 
record I’ve ever made, that’s for sure — it’s a studio artefact. 
But at the same time it's very very intimate. And that's an odd 
combination.” 

There are a few of what Metheny calls “postage 
stamps” stuck to this record, snatches of songs he’s heard from 
n 15 years of orbiting the globe, including 
c. But postage stamps are really 
all they are, or maybe more like labels stuck on a suitcase. This 


74=W1RE 



is as American a record as any he’s made, and he’s suspicious of 
“world-music” as a title for anything. 

“The truth is, most of the pop music in the world now, 
whether it’s from Thailand or wherever, is as influenced by 
Western pop music as by anything in its own culture,” 
Metheny says, acknowledging the inevitable. “Everybody’s got 
variations on that four-four backbeat but it’s still rock and roll 
to me, whether it’s being sung in Thai or French or what. 
Because of the communications revolution it’s really natural 
now for all of us to be influenced by each other, and there’ll 
come a time when everybody’s going to have every TV station 
and radio station in the world on their TV all the time, 
everybody’s going to have access to everything all the time. It’s 
bound to happen that everybody’s going to get all mixed up. 

“Now coming from a country where that’s the basis of our 
society, that seems to me a good thing and is maybe the next 
step in civilisation, but to people who really value purity of 
course, it’s a nightmare. But as far as jazz purity goes, I don’t 
think it ever really existed. The only constant thing I see is 
that it’s never stayed the same, and that people have always 
been very open to whatever they were hearing, which to me is 
maybe the most notable thing about the form. It demands that 


you bring to it whatever your interests are as a listener.” 

Pat Metheny was one of the Berklee school’s most illustrious 
students and teachers, and an awful lot of the recent graduates 
from there are certainly flooding the market with some pretty 
fixed notions of what “jazz purity” is, and a respect for “the 
tradition” that makes many current bebop sessions indisting¬ 
uishable from the 50s in all but the recording technology. 
Does Metheny take exception to 90s neo-classicism? 

“No, I don’t. In a way, I did the same thing. I don’t see how 
it’s possible to become a good jazz player without for three, 
four, five, six, ten years of devotion to learning that language, 

as musicians. All I object to is that what should be a given in 
your education becomes something that people are basing 
careers on. That’s the odd part. Of course you have to 
understand what’s happened in the last 40 or 50 years in that 
music, there’s no way you can become a good player if you 
don’t know it, and it’s complicated. But the people who 
inspire us in that language didn’t stop with what they had to 
learn - the thing that’s so cool about Coltrane and Bird and 
everybody who advanced the cause is exactly that. They 
advanced the cause. ” ■ 



> rAVIRF 



TEN YEARS AND RISING / 


Our Tenth Birthday Party, 
being enjoyed by one and 
all. All we can say is that 
many of those who missed 
it felt even worse (next day) 
than those who were there. 


16 SWIRE 





17 SWIRE 





ALL POINTS 

EAST 




This month our writers examine 
the contributions Asia — near, 
far. South, North — has made 
and is making to the music we 
listen today. In the pages that 
follow, we talk to musicians and 
ponder the problems we set 
ourselves when we divide a 
round world into two 
complementary halves. 



SOME IDEAS 

0F EAST 

Hopey Glass flirts 

WITH NOTIONS OF 

the Orient: where is 

IT, AND WHAT DO WE 
THINK WE WANT WITH IT ? 




robot-voice intones. “Hi Cato! Sorry I’m late!" says the girl, all 
soft-dabbing North-of-England vowels and wide-eyed yearn¬ 
ing innocence. “ You drive so FAST on your motorbike, the lights 
just FLASH by/lf the girls at home could see me now, they’d be SO 
jealoustl love, I love, I love JapanUl love the music, I love the 
lights/Oh, I just LOVE the Tokyo lights!" Is lori & the 
chameleons’ “Touch” (Zoo/Korova/Sire) (A) A charting - 
#70, Dec 79 - slice of postpunk bedroom/headset disco, 
speaking of and to suburban Western girl-teen alienation 
(wannabe-out-ofphere wannabe-other-than-me), or (B) a very 
early manifestation of KLF-er Bill Drummond’s context- 
pranksterism, the 7" as tiny mindfuck-/w/£», capturing a 

The heartbeat/drumbeat throb would hardly have filled 
dancefloors anywhere - the tinkling shimmer of keyboard 
chimes tell you it’s all about privacy, about learning to be 




79 SWIRE 





SOME IDEAS OF EAST 


“What can be addressed in the consideration of the 
Orient,” writes roland barthes, “are not other symbols, 
another metaphysics, another wisdom (though the latter 
might appear thoroughly desirable); it is the possibility of a 
difference, a mutation, of a revolution in the propriety of 
symbolic systems. Someday we must write the history of our 
own obscurity - manifest the density of our narcissism, tally 
down through the centuries the several appeals to difference we 
may have occasionally heard, the ideological recuperations 
which have infallibly followed and which consist in always 
acclimating our incognizance of Asia by means of certain 
known languages ...” The history of our own obscurity? 
Even I write more clearly than this. He’s saying that every 
“East” we reach out to, and develop a way of depicting, ends 
up only a new way of camouflaging some bit of the “West" we 
want attention paid to. That the “punk” East and the “hippy” 
East are Western rather than Eastern exports - which may be 
another way of arguing “we” do things, “they” are things. 

.vr* 

M 

the poster over the fluffy glam-pussy’s shoulder. On the b/w 

complements david sylvian, japan’s curiously motionless 
ethno-percussive funk reaches a plateau of semi-ambient 
excellence with “Ghosts”, their Top Ten hit for Virgin - 
Sylvian the perfect introspective adolescent intellectual-poet, 
celebrating his inability to take control of his life: “Just when I 
thought I could not be stopped! when my chance came to be King!the 
ghosts of my life!grew wilder than the wind .” Forget Coca-cola. 
Everything about Sylvian, his world-view, his eye-liner, the 
music his group writes, with its softly clanging would-be 
Cantonese pentatonics, would count as spiritual pollution, to 
the vicious old men who continue to hold power in Mao’s 
wake, if only occasionally his name. “In Guangzhou alone,” 
writes Fred Shapiro in The New Yorker (29.6.92), “more than 
12,000 arrests were made on Seven Evils charges between 
April 1st and May 20th, and a Shenzen municipal-government 
propaganda official announced a ban on Hong Kong and 
Taiwanese music in the zone’s 300-odd karaoke bars and night 
clubs, where so-called cantopop is said to have completely 
supplanted ‘the outstanding songs from the mainland, which 
are of Chinese cultural characteristics’.” 

“Have you read the writings of Mao?” john cage asked 
Niksa Gligo in 1972. “Well in one of them he says ‘We must 
be absolutely convinced of the goodness of human nature! And 
there is a tendency in the West to be convinced of the badness 
of human nature.” 



Maharishi-disciple, and one of the first dozen teacher-adepts of 
Transcendental Meditation in the States, pursued the path of 
self-effacing improvisation - opened up by coltrane, 
Charles lloyd and others — so far that he ended up recording 
with ravi shankar (or else live in the Taj Mahal!): desolate 
flute blunders bravely against the pitapat of the tabla and the 
winding zzang-twang-zzing of the sitar. 

Who’s searching for what here? Where does Ancient 
Wisdom end and cartoon-cliche begin? Check Paul Horn in 
India , a Blue Note two fer from the mid-70s, to contrast the 

he learned to accept the Eastern way: “A guy is sleeping out in 
the street, and at first you’re horrified, but when you see him 
the next day he doesn’t have any tension lines in his face, he’s 
laughing. He may have to beg for food, but he doesn’t go 
around all day thinking how miserable he is.” 

Oh dear. Then again, realism is not a significant feature of 

Magical all-dancing all-singing wish-fulfillment fantasy is. 
Film-stars are chubby (meaning well-off) compared to Holly¬ 
wood’s anorexic skinflick pin-up bodybuilders. The songs are 
gorgeous dubbed extravaganzas, shrill Frankenstein- 
patchwork quilt-pop combining raga, rock, Spaghetti- 
Western country, mario lanza pop-opera, sci-fi disco; sung 
in studios by a handful of playback singers. Queen of these 
interpreters - with tens of thousands of sessions under her belt 

her estranged sister asha bhosle). (Golden Voices From The 
Silver Screen Volume 1-3 Globestyle). 



But Kraftwerk’s thing is simplicity, stripped-down eco¬ 
nomy stripped down even more. YMO’s sound (a dozen LPs 


20IWIRE 





over half a decade) was a queasy-overload of gaijin reference, 
ramming jazz-fuzak through the BritPop invasion, the cake 
weirdly iced with Space Invaders Nipponism. Kraftwerk can 
make gliding unlocated emptiness magnificently rich; YMO - 
though often just as funny - often seem to leave the amazing 
richness of cultural overload feeling strangely empty. At their 
best they mirror/mock the old idea that any non-Japanese 

Japan, to be absorbed, broadcast back again significantly 
altered. ( Yellow Magic Orchestra, Solid State Survivors and BMG 
have all just been rereleased by Emergo - more are to follow.) 

Sakamoto alone is a mystery: a name but never truly a 
presence - compared to Youssou N’dour, say (who appears in 
both his solo records) — on the laswell-zorn collision- 
network. Admirably committed to the notion of the musical 
treasures every last culture contains untouched in itself, he 

fact is, his careworn Artistic Seriousness is much less exciting 
than YMO’s plasticised techno-bulimia. 



Of the badness of human nature: even ignoring the 
augmented seconds in the scales that make them so oriental, so 
appealing, the strings in led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” sound, in 
surge and slide, as if they might actually be taped backwards. 
This is how you let Satan in, say anti-Rock Fundamentalists, 
as much exercised by such reversals of the natural order of 
music - the fear of backmasking - as they are by longhair- 
flirtation with non-Western religion (however silly). “Kash¬ 
mir” is of course, on the back of its thick black country stomp, 
at least as non-Eastern as it’s non-Western, but because its 

could be extended forever, it reminds everyone of old man 
hegel’s notion of the East - as a region of perfumed despotism 

awareness is change, for Hegel), as a zone where time stands 

Or else compare olivier messaien’s Turangaltla Symphony 
(20th Century Classical’s own “Kashmir”): wherein Catholic 
mysticism meets the melodies of birdsong, where the additive 
rhythms of raga meet vastly lushly erotic post-Debussy 
orchestration (including electronic banshee wails from the 
ondes martenot) and a concept that honours and celebrates the 

Indiana’s pop-art masterpiece “Love Rising” appears on the 
confused? It sounds magnificent, but what can it mean? All of 


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27SWIRE 





SOME IDEAS OF EAST 


The Surrealists first noted how unnatural col¬ 
lage juxtaposition of this-or-that bit of picture unleashed 

for forbidden desires. DJ-remix badboys coldcut slipped 
ofra haza — a single phrase from “Im Nin’Alu” — upfront 
eric b & rakim’s “Paid In Full”, and expanded the reach of 
both (to neither’s immediate pleasure, high chart-placing or 

It’s not as if even straight recording (no sampling, no 
overdubs) is ever innocent, culturally neutral, dispassionate or 
politically disinterested. It’s always a power-play: it always 
sets up a potential for charged contextual juxtaposition: after 
all, who knows what the next listener is doing while he/she 
plays the record? 

When the Kama Sutra first went bigtime in the West, in 
the 60s (ignoring original 19th century translation by perv- 
Arabist adventurer richard burton) it felt as if it fitted, 
with its details of positions, of the ins and outs of before-and- 
after etiquette, into precisely the image of Eastern Wisdom 
Lamonte Young described in reference to raga-modes - a 
notion of completeness, of totality of traditional understand¬ 
ing (no situation too unusual to be omitted). 

In that relentless era of commodified Free Love and Open¬ 
ness, of course, this basically good-hearted upperclass manual 
to great man-woman sex (which begs a whole raft of questions 
as pertinent in feudal India as here and now in the conflicted 
West) provided all sorts of useful pleasure-seeking excuse for 
strait-jacketed predatory male irresponsibility. Intelligence, 
generosity, irony, religious and ethical precision, all also 
present, are notoriously hard to mass-broadcast without a 
shared culture to shore them up. 

Times are later than that now, and more complicated. There 
is a shared culture (left-cosmopolitan PC-swingerism, or 
thereabouts), saeed jaffrey & sally dexter (with west 
india company)’s The Art Of Love: Love, Sex & Eroticism from 
The Kama Sutra (Editions EG) cores (and softcores) the book, 
sets the well-spoken extracts to pattering, glowing back¬ 
ground synth-India wallpaper music: “Places to be kissed are 
the forehead, the eyes, the cheeks, the throat, the breasts, the 
lips and the tongue - one can also kiss under the arms, as well 
as the navel and the lingam and the yoni ...” The erotic-exotic 
is listed, normalised and finally corrupted, precisely by being 
given such quiet-voiced, accent-modulated approval (maybe it 
should have been read by pauline quirke and benjamin 

By contrast, the erotic risk of najma’s Pukar: Calling You 
(Last Minute Productions JAAN 1101) is quite different: these 
desolately near-Platonic partially-Westernised (semi-jazzed) 
ghazals , steely in their underlying reserve/resolve, with all the 
subtle hesitancy of- especially - rhythm, and courtly reticence 
(when she sings in English - not often - she sounds like the 
quietly girly yoko Ono), are nothing if not aware of the perils 
of giving oneself, to a lover, to an audience, to the recording 
industry. Najma’s appeal has probably always been the intelli¬ 


gent distance she chooses to retain, her apparent cultural 
traditionalism, in such utter tension with the process and 
effects of record-making. 

Ofra Haza, Yemenite Israeli cabaret singer, has an image 
already cluttered with tussling East/West, ancient/modern, 
art/pop oppositions. The smartest moment on Kirya (East/ 
West 9031-76127-2) comes when she duets on “Daw Da 
Hiya” with iggy pop, the closest thing rock has to its own 
surviving Old Testament prophet - deepset, visionary, mina¬ 
tory, moral: the perfect critic-seer of that best and worst of 
decades’ good and bad. The rest of the record showcases her 
fabulous, sinuous voice alone (the music pretty but also pretty 
generic). 



Gamelan’s thick mass chime, Qawaali’s keyed- 
up ecstatic wail, the vast dusty blast-chants of the Gyuto 
Monks, the crackle, crack and nasal ring of Peking Opera, the 
forlorn flutter of the shakuhachi, the dip and dive of L. 
Shankar’s violin ... If there are moments in all of these we 
can catch and hold, there are moments which can only be 
inscribed in music alphabets which are just wild shapes to us - 
we see their logic, their unity, their learned strength, but we 
can’t join in. Alice Mak, my friend from Hongkong, made a 
tape for me long ago, of the same Cantopop recently banned by 
a certain Shenzen municipal-government propaganda official. I 
long ago misplaced the crib she wrote me, but I still have the 
tape, with her carefully lettered Chinese characters. The 
music’s nothing but effortlessly sentimental western-eastern 
MOR, the likes of Johnny Yip singing “Love Turns To Hot 
Blood” and “The Sound Of Rain In A Small Flat” (the only 
name and titles I can remember). I love it more than anything 
mentioned above or below. 



22t WIRE 






Some commentators have suggested that no 
one caught the Orient so well as Ellington did, mid-60s, with 
The Far East Suite (BMG/RCA ND87640). Seems a funny 

unapologetically the Duke refused to compromise his and Billy 

essential signatures. He says in Music Is My Mistress he was 
inspired and excited by something Marshall McLuhan - 
remember him? - said on radio, to write the subsequent The 
Afro-Eurasian Eclipse : “The whole world is going oriental, and 

OK, well, if this is so, to Duke the “orientalisation” audibly 
(obviously) meant nothing more or less than the impress of 
Swing as the first global lingua franca , a music flexible enough 
to enter a terrain without destroying what was already 
obtained therein, voracious enough not to be able to resist 
coupling with it. 

It becomes, necessarily, tragically, the plaything of the 
leisured classes (abidingly weird Vietnam-era image: Prince 
norodom sihanouk, formerly Cambodia’s monarch, present¬ 
ly puppet-frontman of the Khmer Rouge, blowing his sax¬ 
ophone and leading his own personal Swing Orchestra, as 
capably as - if somewhat less anti-coloriially than - fela 

Something similar happens with Sakamoto’s global-pop: the 
East’s peter gabriel, concerned, liberal, intelligent, offers 
with his openended acceptability an “Orientalisation” that’s 
ultimately a threat to all. 

Some suggest that the highly entertaining JapRap group 
MELON - Deep Cut (Epic 450513 1) - threw away their once 
subversive lead as the most rhythmically incompetent HipHop 
group on the planet, when they became Major Force, to toe 
party lines, to play properly. But there’s something robustly 
healthy — a reverse-abnegation? - about such cultural reti¬ 
cence. Think also of the proliferation of Zorn’s beloved 
Japcore, such incomprehensible, urgent, abandoned thrash- 
punk outfits as outo, gauze, systematic death, execute. 


GASTUNK, GHOUL, SIC, FUCK GEEZ, MAD CONFLUX, DON DON, 

fvk, the ubiquitous lipcream. As Ben Thompson noted here 
recently, metal is thus become the “real" world music - you 
couldn’t for a second tell what region these grunting nutters 
come from (several compilations, including A Farewell To Arms 
on Nuclear Blast Records, Thrash Til Death On Selfish/ 
Pusmort and Virus on Jungle Hop through Southern). You do 
know they want something else, something more; that dis¬ 
satisfaction, refusal, bloodyminded guttural inarticulateness 


So at last to shonen knife, three shy girls in com¬ 
plementary Mondrian-dresses - a half step ahead, you might 
say, and the last word so far in Jap-punk (publically worship¬ 
ped by US grunge-underground stars Sonic Youth, Nirvana 
and the rest: try Pretty Little Baka Guy!Live In Japan on 



23-WIRE 
























SUNS OF ARQA 



Jonathan Romney talks to the Manchester raga-dubmeisters 
in Mew York! (That’s raga — not ragga . . .) 

Illustration: Anwen Matthews. 


apart: FILE UNDER . . . 

Once the debate opened up about that chimerical category 
‘world music’ - see it as a kind of all-encompassing mystery 
space between the other musics we thought we knew - and all 
kind of trans-cultural profligacies began to happen, then not 
only did genres start to dialogue among themselves, but we 
realised there simply weren’t enough ways to describe the 
different kinds of dialogue. This is by way of an admission of 
defeat. Over the last few years, I’ve lost count of the number of 



‘Collision’ has served pretty well, thanks to Bill Laswell, 

conflict and of the Shock of the New, assumptions that don’t 
always account for some of the subtler transgressions we’ve 
witnessed. On consideration, though, I might opt for ‘dis¬ 
placement’, with its sense of unforeseen, perhaps illicit, traffic 
of elements from one realm to another. And it also accounts for 
the effect on the listener, the effect of thinking you’re in one 
place and finding yourself in another. There’s the sense of 
disorientation, of not knowing where you are, or where the 
thing you’re listening to really comes from — at bottom, the 
effect of hearing the names Bombay and Birmingham (Alaba- 


doing a Suns of Arqa interview not up in ‘their’ home base of 
Manchester, but over the phone to New York, the last place 
you might expect to find ‘them’. One Michael Wadada, who is 
to all intents and purposes the Suns of Arqa, is over there at 


opportunity to record a dub album for cassette label ROIR 
while he’s there). 

talking face-to-face — it would almost be a letdown to discover 
that this singularly opaque recording entity actually has a face. 
But simply talking to Wadada is demystifying, because he’s so 
matter of fact, even somewhat diffident, about one of the 

free of its limiting laws, and largely unsung - over the last 
decade. 


From 1979 ’s Revenge of the Mozabites to this year’s 
Alap-Joe-Jhala , the Suns have taken hybridisation to the outer 
limits. In theory, they mix Indian classical with dub reggae 
rhythms - ‘raga reggae’ as their tag has it. In practice, they’ve 
also taken in northern soul, acid house, techno, European 
mediaeval, Irish folk and country, while their DIY sleeve art 
has mixed Asian, European, Egyptian and plain old sci-fi 
beat-group iconography with a stylistic syncretism that even 
fellow solar space-ace Sun Ra would be hard pressed to equal. 
A multiplicitous hydra-headed combo, various Suns have 
taken in fiddlers, shenhai players, didgeriduists, Mancunian 
electro-boffin Eric Random, blues chanteuse Helen Watson, 
John Cooper Clarke (who occasionally orates apocryphal pro¬ 
nouncements - we’re far from fuckin’ Chickentown here), the 
former drummer of Simply Red, the late, legendary reggae 
rasper Prince Far I (Wadada’s mentor, who christened him 

lian ‘Professor’ Stanley Unwin. It adds up to the kind of 
heteroclite scramble that would have the KLF giggling down 
their voluminous sleeves with neo-Situationist glee. Wadada, 
however, is not a man to have much truck with Concepts. The 
Suns simply do what they do. The word ‘organic’ isn’t used, 


25S WIRE 




SUNS OF ARQA 


although it might well be. 

All this on Enterprise Allowance, too. Considering the 
extreme shoe-string nature of his venture, Wadada has been 
remarkably prolific. “I could do a lot more if it wasn’t for the 

There’s an infinite amount of:music to be made. ” 

Theoretically, the frame is infinite, the gaping maw of the 
Arqan monster infinitely voracious. Anything can fit in: 
Alap-Joe-Jhala features a four-piece Suns, with Nicolas Magriel 
on the sarangi, a 35-stringed bowed instrument. At one point, 
the Arqans metamorphosed into the soul covers band Sprout 
Head Uprising, which is still occasionally Wadada’s output for 
his folk-country guises. Out in Woodstock, he’s been working 
with local Jamaican musicians. It’s all Arqa. In theory, says 
Wadada. Anyone, but anyone, is welcome (one Arqa sleeve 

spiritually and musically - I don’t want some rock and rollers 
coming along and singing about motorbikes and drinking.” 

If they did, they’d soon end up on a more devotional tune, 
maybe launching forth on the cadences of Faure’s Requiem - the 
basis of the Suns’ mediaevally-inclined Seven album. The 
spiritual message of the Arqans, says Wadada, is straightfor- 

you reach the inner self you reach the eternal. Most religions 
are rooted in the past, whereas spirituality is rooted in the 
present. And if it’s in the present, there are no dogmas to go 
with it.” 

A dogma or two, or at least, a coherent manifesto (for 
which, read: PR image) might have helped the name of Arqa 
resound a bit more decisively through their career, rather than 

becomes them. When the ‘band’ plays, it’s with different 
line-ups - usually starting with a raga, with bass and drums 
stepping in over them. Wadada himself takes a back seat 

England, we’ve had one band in London, one in Manchester. 
The American companies see it as a pretty strange way to run a 
band, but they’re really intrigued. In England, they won’t 


One of the functions of the Suns is an archeological one, 
to illuminate the areas of music that official history forgets. It 
might be because Wadada approached Indian music from the 



“If you go to India and see a 

PERFORMANCE IN A SMALL VILLAGE, 
THE MUSICIAN IS AT THE FRONT OF 
THE TEMPLE PLAYING TO THE ALTAR 
AND THE AUDIENCE IS BEHIND HIM, 
HE’S NOT PLAYING TO THE AUDI¬ 
ENCE. That’s the difference — 
Western music is about a perfor¬ 
mer AND AN AUDIENCE ...” 


“But the original music is like Eastern European. It’s 
unbelievable, but nobody’s heard it. We’re gonna bring that 

applies to Bulgarian folk, although with that Wadada intends 
Beinsa (1864-1944). 

Wadada is wary of professing affinities. Bhangra is dis¬ 
counted, as is the bulk of Indian pop. “It’s based on Western 

worse.” Reggae - names like Ras Michael, Culture and friend 
and mentor Far-I — gets the approval. Dance culture in general 
doesn’t, although you can see how the Suns’ devotionalist 
tendencies might fit with the beatifism that’s marked the 
hippie fringes of House. Indeed, despite Wadada’s professed 
distance from the culture, their track “Govinda” has been 
twice remixed, once as “Govinda’s House” (on the Belgian 
label Antler/Subway, home of New Beat!) and more recently 


261 WIRE 


NEW NOTE 

FORTHCOMING 
— RELEASES — 



27SWIRE 





















Guide to Good 

TABLA MANNERS 


The first time I ever heard percussionist Trilok Gurtu 
play was in a memorable concert by Oregon at the inaugural 
Glasgow International Jazz Festival, back in 1987. Gurtu had 
joined the band two years earlier, following the tragic death of 
Collin Walcott, a musician he knew and respected. In a sense, 
they were mirror images of each other, in that Walcott was an 
American percussionist obsessed by Indian music, while Gurtu 
is a classically-trained Indian musician weaned on jazz and 


American’s contribution was more overtly “Eastern” - com¬ 
plete with sitar - than the much more rhythmically aggres¬ 
sive, urgent style favoured by the new man. 

“When they asked me to join the group, I just played how I 
feel,” says Gurtu. “I told them this is how I play, and I can’t 
play like somebody else. They changed the music very much, 

for the music. I have to listen to what everyone is doing, and 
play with them - if Paul is playing oboe, then I have to watch 
out that I don’t overplay dynamically. But if he is on 
saxophone, then maybe I can cook it up a bit.” 

The following year, Gurtu was back in Glasgow, and the 
concert he took part in was again the highlight of the event. 
This time, he played with the John McLaughlin Trio, caught 
that night in incandescent form which I have heard them get 
close to since, but never quite recapture. Gurtu created his 


Percussionist with Oregon 
and John McLaughlin, 
Trilok Gurtu turned 
onto the West when the 
West — from John Coltrane 
to the Fab Four — was 
looking resolutely Eastward. 

Kenny Mathieson 
talks to him about hippies, 
rigour and Don Cherry. 
Picture: Marc Mamie 


sion. He and McLaughlin, long fascinated by Indian music, 

that relationship has become strained. 

Both groups confirmed the ease - doubtless the product of 

percussionist has distinctively synthesised a wide range of 
musical influences. He was born into a highly musical family 
in Bombay - his mother, Shoba Gurtu, was featured on his 
debut album for CMP, Us/ret, in 1988 - and began a classical 
training at the age of five, almost as a natural process. 

“My mother is a classical singer, my grandmother is a 
classical singer, and my grandfather on my father’s side was a 
sitar player and a scholar of music, and on and on it goes. We 


?=WIRE 




always had music around us. It was like food, and I discovered 
it naturally, as a source of pleasure, but also as something 
which I had to give something of myself to - this is what I 
understood by music, as far as I could analyse it when I was 

Gurtu underwent the discipline of a rigorous training where 
“you get spanked if you don’t play something right.” Even¬ 
tually, he grew a little discouraged by it. He did, though, lay 
down a solid technical foundation for himself, earning impor¬ 
tant lessons about tuning, and how to accompany the rhyth¬ 
mically complex, formalised ragas. That training, notably the 
essentially polyrhythmic techniques of the tabla - where tabla 
players “think of in terms of patterns” - fed directly into his 


later love for jazz. It is still heard in his work today. 

He maintains, however, that the most important part of his 
early musical experience lay in developing “a spiritual love for 
music, rather than just treating it as entertainment. You have 
to satisfy your inner comfort as well as playing for the people. 
Training is training, and I think you can adapt what you learn 
to any music. Jazz musicians learn the standards and so on, 
and it is all the same - you have to be honest with yourself to 
learn to play.” 

The broad base of Gurtu’s current style was laid in India. As 
a teenager in the late 60s and early 70s, he was exposed to a 
range of Western music which included not only Elvin Jones 
and Tony Williams, but also James Brown, King Crimson, 


2PEW1RE 



WHEN 

THE 


TWAIN 

MEET 


“We first met two years ago,” recalls Japanese percus¬ 
sionist Ikue Mori on the day following her duo concert with 
Belgian singer Catherine Jauniaux at the London Musicians 
Collective’s recent Festival of Experimental Music. “That was 

York. People saw us, somehow imagined it together and 
Brow slightly knotted, Jauniaux hunches forward from a 

“Oh, that’s right, we did!” Mori stands corrected. “Those 
Jauniaux adds: “And people said that was the best part.” 


When out-rocker 
Catherine Jauniaux 
(from Romania via 
Belgium) finally 
teamed up with former 
No Waver Ikue Mori 
(from Japan), in 
London, John Corbett 


Could be be that this duo is indeed the best part. Until 
seeing them, Mori’s electronic percussion was a source of some 
bafflement to me. Earlier, she’d seemed a trifler, a hunt-and- 
pecker dabbling at her drum machine’s stock sounds without 

of time with a rich range of timbres, textures and even 


WAS THERE TO SEE IT, 
AND TO TALK TO THEM 
AFTERWARDS. 


playing and recording as an invited guest), with this duo her 
singing is substantive, the basal stuff. 

In principle, they make a well-suited pair, two petite 
women interested in equally - as they put it — “compact” 



best part can’t be far behind. 


In all fairness, for Mori and Jauniaux the respective road 
get to this meeting point were both full of varied, exci 
sound-making. Hardly the “worst part” by any measure. 


she began to find repugnant. “I felt really in jail,” 


of voice. I couldn’t express myself, except in the interpn 
tion. And that was not enough.” In fact, Jauniaux traces 




305WIRE 






IKUE MORI/CATHERINE JAUNIAUX 


a little child. I would go into my room with my book of poems 
and sing them. And I always invented languages. I think it’s 
because it’s a need. 1 need to do that!” 

Her improvising didn’t come completely out of thin air, 
though. Dagmar Krause’s chilly vocal work with Art Bears 
was an inspiration that Jauniaux followed up by joining Marc 
Hollander’s Belgian vanguard-rock band Aqsak Maboul. 
Fidgety, skitterish, at times bird-like, Jauniaux’ voice burbles 
above the Bo Diddley beat on the classic “A Modern Lesson" 
from their Un Peu De L’Ame Des Bandits , where her remarkable 
imitative abilities are used to trade lines with guitar, percus¬ 
sion and reeds. At a concert with the short-lived Maboul, 
English out-rock group The Work asked her to join their 
merry band. She obliged, touring and recording with them in 
the early-80s, and proved herself to be a truly distinctive 
emergent voice. 

Since that time, she’s sung with most of the Recommended/ 
Woof Records’ eclectic crew, guested with numerous other 
groups like Test Department, and she led her own multi- 
media band Jonio. Cellist Tom Cora, who played on Fluvia 
(the record she made in collaboration with ex-Henry Cow 
saxophonist/keyboardist Tim Hodgkinson), in turn invited her 
to sing on his collaboration with Dutch anarchist punkers the 
Ex. Cora and Jaunaiux have an ongoing duo as well, and she 
also appears on the debut of Third Person, a fill-in-the-blank 
trio with Cora, percussionist Sam Bennett and a third . . . 
well, you got it. Most recently, she has participated in Heiner 
Goebbels’ opera Romanische Hunde , a “patchwork” piece featur¬ 
ing “a rapper, two classical singers, one Spanish more theatric¬ 
al guy and one Italian professor”, voicing texts from Heiner 
Muller, Brecht and ancient Roman sources. 

“I think I like every kind of sad music,” she says, laughing. 
“It’s like the only thing I can do. I need to sing the sadness of 
life.” The last few years have seen her explore the bottom end 
of her range — she prefers her low voice to what I identify as her 
stratospheric highness. Likewise, time has brought out the 
more overtly ’folk’ (in Jauniaux’ case Gypsy) element in her 
singing “I am very sensitive to Eastern music,” she muses, 
“because my grandmother is from Romania and she was a 
singer. I have a kind of relationship with her without knowing 
her. It was very obvious when I started to improvise that I had 
this impression that I was improvising for her, or by her, or by 
these people who died in my Romanian family.” 

Together with a newfound interest in Skip James, Jauniaux 
directly attributes this tendency to her 1989 relocation to the 
Big Apple. “I’m out of my culture in New York. The fact that 
I’m far from this culture makes me desire it. It makes me come 
back to these kind of roots." 



And I also like to write dark songs from the dark side of your 
mind. It’s more easy to express than a sort of gay feeling. Just 
more naturally comes out ... a terrible thought.” Perhaps 
that same dark drive prompted Mori to move from Tokyo to 
New York in 1977 and start playing drums in a no wave band. 
Yes, that’s her amid the mug shot line-up on the back of No 
New York with the ID-tag “Ikue lie, DNA Drums”! 

“I never played drums before or anything,” she admits in 
still-choppy English. “But also Arto Lindsay never played 
guitar before. It was very easy to make our music. Three of us 
never played before, but everybody just starting at that point, 
just pick up guitar, bass, singing. Very exciting time.” 

As DNA unwound its five-year strand, Mori became friends 
with punkophile/Japanophile John Zorn, who promptly intro¬ 
duced her to the downtown NY scene and its cast of shady 
characters. Before long, she was a regular on the improvising 
circuit. I first saw her in a drum duet with someone who no 
longer plays at the now-defunct Tin Pan Alley. She spent some 
years going back and forth to Japan, playing and recording in 
ad hoc improvising settings as well as with bands. But she’s 
finally given up all attempts to start an ongoing rock groups, 
now that Toh Ban Djan, her rock duo with bassist Luli Shioi, 
has broken up. 

Partly because she was feeling the inhibition of being a 
technically limited drummer, Mori bought a small, very basic 
drum machine in 1986. Thereafter, she has devoted most of 
her energies to putting together the fresh, three drum- 
machined sound she now uses. “Of course, you can work on 
melody,” she explains. “And you can pull out more music 
from your head. With drums, it’s just drums because I have no 
technique.” She now has a colossal palette of tuned percussion, 
metallic scrapes, brushes, and echoey, whispery inexplicables, 
all mixed into a live-dub potpourri, with panoramic stereo and 
a very visual sensibility to boot. For first evidence of the full 
effect on record, check out her contribution to harpist Zeena 
Parkins’ Ursa's Door. 

Apart from her relationship with Jauniaux, Mori has a few 
other fave projects. She works as often as possible in a quartet 
with guitarist Frith, vocalist Shelly Hirsch and bassist Mark 
Dresser. And occasionally she hooks up with Joey Baron the 
most in-demand drummer in NYC. “I really enjoy playing 
with him,” says Mori. “He is like my drum hero.” Of late, 
she’s also been cultivating a strong interest in the visual, 
mixing songs with film and video. 

What makes two musicians decide to work together? 
Some magical combination of affinities and differences, no 


32=WIRE 




















Three different Asias come 
together in New York City: 
China, Korea and Japan. 
Andrew Pothecary talks to the 
Far East Side Band, and 
pictures them where they live. 


First myth: New York as melting pot. Hyphenated 
nationalities are indicative, perhaps, of an unresolved segrega¬ 
tion rather than a happy merge. Half the population seems 
about ready to jump out of the melting pot and into the fire 

Second myth: “Only in New York”. Apparently an exten¬ 
sion of “Only in America”, a phrase that’s in fact applicable - 
when used of New York - more to unfortunate experiences 

So where could you listen to a Chinese-American, Korean 
and Japanese trio playing traditionally influenced composi¬ 
tions and improvisations for ten dollars and a two drinks 

corner from the kosher Chinese Shalom restaurant)? 

Well, only in New York. 

“Both of you,” Jason Hwang, American-born Chinese 
initiator of The Far East Side Band, says to his band mates, 
“You came from a different country, went through all the 
difficulty of learning another language and functioning, 
making a living in another country. And to me that's a 

own sound.” 

The UK’s ’Asian’ is America’s ‘East Indian’, their ‘Asian’ 
our (ugly word) ‘Oriental’: I’ll be using the American ‘Asian’ 
throughout. So this band is a grouping of Asian nationalities - 
Yukio Tsuji and Sang-Won Park, who complete the line-up, 
are Japanese and Korean born respectively - and of Asian and 
multi-national musics and sounds. The Japanese friend I was 
with summarised it, simply enough, as “very oriental”. 

For Jason his first trip to Asia — to Korea in fact - was only 

everybody had a certain body language. I watched people 


New York.” It’s a body language, a cultural language, which 
he began to see in himself and the reasons for why he plays the 

began: “Yukio was one of the first people that I met who was 
really into using {Asian] instruments for personal expression. 
And Sang’s solo concert was the weirdest thing I ever heard,” 

Some of what Jason — as initiator - is trying to do with the 
band is a result of hyphenation. He says to his two band mates: 
“Both of you grew up in America, but being an American but 
Asian is a different experience because you’re always a fore¬ 
igner. I was accustomed to seeing my parents adapt to this 
country. I have a vivid memory of my father when he first 
retired. These people came over for coffee. When they left, my 
father and mother came to me and said, ‘Did we do this right?’ 

I said, ‘Do what?’ and they said, you know the coffee, the cake 
and all that . . . The whole custom of relating in that way, 
that type of interaction and ritual they learned from, you 
know, watching TV ...” 

“Jason Hwang,” says Sang, “he look very Asian. But when I 
talk to him he’s totally American.” He’s not just talking of 



It’s an attitude at odds with his traditional training - or at 


34-WIRE 









FAR EAST SIDE BAND 


least the audience expectations. [The Three members’ musical Sang and going to Asia was very important to me, because I 

training and histories are part of the sum of the music.] really had certain things I identified with for the first time.” 


I first heard Jason Hwang’s creamy, expansive violin 
only a couple of weeks before The Far East Side’s first gig in 
April this year (which just goes to show how much I miss). It 
stood out even among the collective talent of the Reggie 
Workman Ensemble. Jason studied classical until he was 18 
but is otherwise a self-taught composer and improviser - 
playing alongside the likes of Billy Bang, Henry Threadgill 
and Butch Morris. Yukio and Sang both moved to America 
around 1979. Yukio and Jason knew each other from about 
this time (at the tail end of New York’s loft scene) and later 
co-arranged and performed the music of the successful and 
emotional examination of East West relationships M. Butterfly 
both on Broadway and nationally. Yukio is completely self- 


they’d blend”) and has worked with a variety of dance and 
theatre companies as composer and performer (including Kei 
Takei, and on David Hwang’s House of the Sleeping Beauties , and 
the title music for the film The Year of the Dragon. In Japan, by 


Sang, who has performed a repertoire of traditional Korean 
music as well as performing with Henry Kaiser and Laurie 
Anderson, says simply of his history, “Mine was different.” He 
says, “I went to school. And scholars teach and learn the 
structure. If someone has no structure I feel very messy and 
busy. What I should do— play another crazy noise. No feeling. 
No stream.” (Jason interjects with a laugh, “You may not have 
been playing with good people!”) 

The Far East Side Band improvise around structures, 
influenced by traditions in Eastern music. Learnt traditional 
knowledge like Sang’s help in this. But the band is also there 
to challenge the rules of tradition as well. As Sang said about 
the seriousness of the Korean baseball players, in traditional 
Korean music - as indeed in much strict classical recital — he 
talks of the audience watching, listening for mistakes. It’s that 
that’s absent in the casual atmosphere of the likes of the New 
Music Cafe and allows him the freedom to play like the 

While researching traditional Korean music, Jason found 
another link between ‘Western’ improvisation and Eastern 
music. He read that certain traditional Korean music was 
“highly improvised — in fact it was free improvisation that had 
become somewhat more formalised over centuries. The music 
was so unified,” he says, “because people understood the 
language of the phrasing. Almost like be-bop [where] playing 

language flows . . . Having not listened to that much Korean 

methods, it was really inspiring ... I mean there are very few 
Chinese-Americans in the music,” he adds about the US 
improvised music scene, “and that’s why meeting Yukio and 


So w a t ’ s identifiably contributing to making this 
music “very oriental'’? Of course, there’s the instruments. 
Yukio’s own hand-made percussion which can be almost vocal 
in their description, that don’t necessarily ‘drive’ the music in 
the literal way that Western drums might but delineate a 
rhythm. Plus his use of the Japanese wind instrument, the 
shakuhachi. Sang’s poetic, celloistic kayagum, a 12 silk¬ 
stringed instrument with.a clear, vibrating tone (helped by a 
rounded fret board) and distinguished in part from the similar 
Japanese koto by its being played by fingers not finger pieces, 
as well as its aim for discrete notes rather than a follow on of 
others. (Sang also occasionally uses a wooden bow for a cruder, 
abrasive sound.) And Jason’s non-acoustic violin, built in 
Vermont by Tucker Barret and a bridge by Richard Barbera 
with a pick-up under each string — including a fifth low C 
string which crosses it more easily into the range of the 
kayagum. Jason gives its own richly emotional sound, some¬ 
times wailing with hurt, sometimes restrainedly plucked, 
sometimes leaving space for the gutsy, strong, blues-like sense 
of pain (identifiable from the Korean opera form Pansori) that 
he hears and is attracted to in Sang’s playing. Sometimes 
approximating the quality of the shakuhachi or becoming 

rhythms, such as speech patterns, that Jason considers they 

But it’s speech patterns that Jason returns to when consider¬ 
ing how a music can be “very oriental”. That distinction 
perceived between Eastern and Western music (indeed be¬ 
tween the ‘East’ and ‘West’ in terms of arts and business and 
even some ignorances concerning the mysterious ‘Japanese 
mind’) that is most commonly heard in complaints of dis- 
chord, off-rhythms and tonal differences. He sees that melodic 
and lyrical sense have some relation to language - the 
language’s inflection, shape and length of sentence being 
reflected in the music. He mentions how linguists have broken 
down language into basic, simple phonemes and noticed 
similarities in various languages at this level when comparing, 
say, an angry paragraph of speech. And if this is just the start 
in defining what he sees as the indefinable reasons why a music 
might be identifiably Indian or Chinese or English, it also 
comes back to what’s unanimously agreed in the band: that 
music is emotionally universally comprehensible - and enjoy- 


What Sang likes about a Far East Side Band gig is that “the 
ambience is natural, what in Korea farmer’s band play. They 
play to enjoy. They don’t play to let someone judge the music. 
People really live the music they play.” 

“The Far East Side Band,” Jason agrees, “is definitely a 
farmer’s band.” M 


The Far East Side Band will be recording during the simmer 


35IWIRE 


Ideas continued from page 23 


Rockdisc). Wide-eyed and dangerously cute, they offer — on 
the surface — clumsily beautiful karaoke-retreads of The 
Buzzcocks, The Ramones, The Stranglers (more naive even 
than the Shangri-Las - “I Wanna Eat Choco Bars", “Ice Cream 
City”, “Space Christmas” — except that they play, or sort of 
play, all their own instruments, and write all their own songs). 
All this thrown into a fiercely charged melange of images of 
throwaway Japanese consumer-culture, and their own sweet 

several forms remain fixed, in themselves and in relationship 
to each other, wherever they travel. Of course, since Iggy this 
implacable noise has been a site for the expression of doubt, 
confusion, mutability, mutation, identity breakdown. So are 
Shonen Knife telling us something we already know — that we 
told them, even - or are they saying something quite new, 
quite different? 


“East is East and West is West, and never the twain 
. . .”: Mr Kipling does make excellent quote. But consider — 
to any child born on the Pacific Rim (and seeing as this is 
certainly the site of the economic struggles of the immediate 
future, this is where we are all now born), “East” is in fact 
West and “West” is East. Unless you look backwards across 
poor worn-out old Europe, the long way round the world. ■ 




“Today there are doubtless a 1000 things to learn 
about the Orient: an enormous labour of knowledge is and will 
be necessary (its delay can only be the result of an ideological 
occultation); but it is also necessary that, leaving aside vast 
regions of darkness (capitalist Japan, American acculturation, 
technological development), a slender thread of light search 
out not other symbols but the very fissure of the symbolic.” 
Roland Barthes 

“In one night club, the singer, a pretty young woman in red 
shorts, asked for musical requests, and someone requested ‘The 
East Is Red’, China’s Cultural Revolution anthem. After a 
surprised pause, the singer began, 'The East is Red; the sun rises; 
there appears in China a Mao Zedong.' At this point, she broke 
off, laughing. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t know the words’.” 
Fred Shapiro 

“You must know, noble stranger, that many things occur here 
in Tibet which would seem unbelievable to you men of the 
West.” Tintin in Tibet. 



The Whittingham 
Awards 

for Popular Music or Jazz 

These awards have been established in memory of 
Peter Whittingham who admired the work 
of George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, 
Marvin Hamlisch, Stephen Sondheim, 
George Shearing, Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson. 


1992 Award 
£3,000 


Open to individuals of any age for projects in the 
creation, performance, teaching, research or study 


Last date for receipt of entries: 18th September 1992 
For information leaflet and application form 
please send SAE to: 

The Trusts Administrator, Whittingham Awards, 
16 Ogle Street, London W1P 7LG. 

Tel: 071-636 4481 Fax: 071-637 4307. 


37SWIRE 









THE ( CONTINUING ) DECLINE OF THE 

WEST 


“Let our music speak for itself." The ironic refrain of 
Joi’s debut single “Desert Storm’’/“Spiritual Get Together”, a 
minor cyclone of seductive beats dropped into a maelstrom of 

praise they could see coming, to no avail. Just back from 
Glastonbury, Rhythm King had booked Haroon and Farook 
Shamsher into the studios. They weren’t giving any interviews 
- so perhaps this presents an opportunity to step back from the 
uncritical media admiration they’ve been subjected to and look 
for other ways to view this Asian Deep House collective. 

Signed to Transglobal, a subsidiary of Rhythm King, 
it’s useful to remember that - with Betty Boo (Malay- 
Scottish), Mark Moore (Burmese-English) and Tim Simenon 
(Chinese/Malay-Scottish) as established chart presences - 
Rhythm King have probably launched more “Eastern-British” 
Pop Talent than any other label in the 80s/90s. More 
importantly, each act’s pop-fluidity has allowed them to 
escape restricted ethnicity, to reinvent their bodies. Boo’s Space 
1990 kitsch-rap, Moore’s S’Express paeans to machine-ecstasy, 
Simenon’s Bomb The Bass midtempo mood-excursions, each 
rode to success on a wave of digital bricolage. Each has played 
off notions of “the East” already current in House; the fourth 
(and best) S’Express single “Mantra For A State Of Mind”, the 
cover for the second Bomb The Base LP Into The Territory, 
which showed Amazon-type Indians crouched on a river’s 
edge, as they’d foreseen 1992’s overground interest in the 
“techno-pagan”. (The Amazon? That's a long way East! - Ed.] 
Joi also — sometimes - resort to the same sort of strategy, 

sampler-sequencer combo to cheat outdated notions of minor¬ 
ity expression (notions of who’s allowed to comment on what, 
where - and how). If Digital Technology lets you speak from 
many places in many (or no) tongues, then maybe the burden 
of representation, so heavy in less accelerated forms (films, 
written fiction . . .) can be evaded. “Desert Storm” is, after 
all, an instrumental “about” the Gulf War. It makes more 
sense to compare a meditation like this to the sharply 
dissimilar Disposable Heroes’ “Winter Of The Long Hot 
Summer” than to the apparently similar likes of Apache 
Indian’s bhangra-ragga assertions of persona-as-self. Joi are at 
pains to point out that they fold other musics into their sound, 
involving Celtic and Moroccan as well as Bengali musicians. 
Their long-standing involvement, in the East End-based 
Joi-Bangla movements, where they’ve helped set up plays and 
educational projects, as well as allying themselves to other 
causes, gives them an expressive, didactic aspect — which they 
happily embrace as an opportunity, rather than letting it 
weigh them down. 


From 'Islamatronic’ to Machine 
Mantras, Asian-directed dance units are 
putting the “Deep” back into House’s 
equation of the East with mysticism. 
Kodwo Eshun assesses Joi’s place in the 
pantheon of Pop Gods. 

Sometimes this manifests itself as a clearing of the decks. 
House — which everywhere proclaims its openness to all 
sources — they have severely criticised, for its rape of Asian 
music. Because sampling can only log a small amount of 
information, it can only produce aural snapshots, moments of 
fixation whose culture-effect is likely to be a result of 
over-familiarity. In principle, because there are no limits 
within Technology, there could arise a new respect for limits 
already in place, for investments in music which go beyond the 
particular aesthetic moment (perhaps to explore radical modes 
of ritual, or healing . . .). Instead House, careless, swagger¬ 
ing, seems at times only to reinforce the old binary opposition: 
Eastern traditionalism, Western modernity. 

Boy George, Primal Scream, The Orb - they all supplement 
their music with “Asian-effect” samples, so as to evoke a 
transcendence which speaks of escape, of leaving the body 
behind, of quitting this place here, this time now. Joi often 
seek the same flight, but find themselves, quite ludicrously, 
labelled “Asia’s answer to Public Enemy", because of their 
declared disgust at British House sound-thieves. Another new 
Asian group, Fun“Da”Mental, led by Aqi Qureshi, MD of 
Nation Records (whose hit single “Templehead” by Transglob¬ 
al Underground took culture-effect Techno-Paganism to 
tripped-out, delirious limit earlier this year) find their skilful 
collision of chants and messages - which evokes an alliance 
between the Nation of Islam and Revolutionary Islam in India 
itself- banned from UK TV. They have an ‘Islamatronic’ (The 
Grid’s term) presence (which is also poised for success. 

Actually both Fun“Da”Mental and Joi, Pop entryists on the 
brink of such mainstream success, find themselves frozen in a 
posture of emergence, partly because British music commen¬ 
tary is so relentlessly present tense, but also because both have 
very quickly exceeded and therefore firmly brought back into 
relief some unspoken terms of Indipop crossover success — the 
only previous example of which remains the demure, tuneful 
feminity of Sheila Chandra and Monsoon's (1982, but still 
echoed) “Ever So Lonely”. 


3S5WIRE 


continued on page 71 



JPSWIRE 



the charts The monthly project to turn 


the whole world into lists. 
Your charts are welcome 
- in fact, they inspire us! 



Saverio Pechini’s one hundred 
(and rising) 

101. Early Works Steve Reich 

102. No New York Various Artists 

103. Centrafrique Anthologie de la Musique des Pygmees Area 

104. The Ascension Glenn Branca 

105. Einstein On The Beach Philip Glass 

106. Machine Gun Peter Br'otzmann 

107. Devotion John McLaughlin 

108. Facing You Keith Jarrett 

109. In a Silent Way/Bitches Brew Miles Davis 

110. 20 Jazz Funk Greats Throbbing Gristle 

111. Music For Airports Brian Eno 

112. Psychocandy Jesus & Mary Chain 

113. Liest Holderlin Martin Heidegger 

114. Voice Is The Original Instrument Joan La Barbara 

115. Jazz Advance Cecil Taylor 

116. Indeterminancy John Cage! David Tudor 

117. Le Marteau Sans MaTtre Pierre Boulez 

118. Kollaps Einsturzende Neubauten 


The Rhythm Shower’s Free-dub 21 

1. Hairy Mary Jackie Mittoo (from VIA compilation) 

2. The Gun Doctor Alimantado (from Love Is Dr Alimantado) 

3. Hell Is For Heroes Big Youth (from Natty Cultural Dread) 

4. Braces Tower Dub Augustus Pablo (from King Tubby 
Meets The Rockers) 

5. Dub Three The Mighty Two (from African Dub Chapter 
Three) 

6. Steadie Blackboard (from / Wah Dub) 

7. Return Of Super Ape Upsetters (from Return Of Super Ape) 

8. Sir Niney’s Rock Observer All Stars (from King Tubbys 
Special) 

». Two Old Timers Moebius & Plank (from Rastakraut Pasta) 

10. Theme PiL ((tom Public Image) 

11. Newtown The Slits (from Cut) 

12. Big Muff John Martyn (from One World) 

13. Trench Warfare WMleICzukaylLtebezeit (from Trench 
Warfare EP) 

14. Blessed Are Those Who Struggle Mark Stewart &The 
Maffia (from Learning To Cope With Cowardice) 

15. Baby Milk Snatcher ARKane (from 69) 

16. Dub Masai Style Bobby Kouders House Rhythms (12") 

17. Bomba Invaders Of The Heart (12") 

18. 18" Speakers Ragga Twins (12") 

19. Blue Lines Massive Attack (from Massive Attack) 

20. Give Me Your Love Smith & Mighty (from Steppers Delight 
EP) 

21. When (Version) Steely & Cleevie (12") 


r The Rhythm Shower, from Glasgow. 







<» SWIRE 











THE 
JAZZ 
SIDE OF 


THE 

S 

P 

o 

o 

N 

Have you heard the one about the blues singer who 
made his debut in Calcutta, India? Think about it. If it was a 
joke, it would be hard to think of a punch-line that’s not racist 
or otherwise offensive. But it’s actually true that Jimmy 
Witherspoon did this very thing as a World War II merchant 
marine, singing “Blues Around The Clock" with the Calcutta- 
resident band of pianist Teddy Weatherford, ex-Chicagoan 
ex-rival of Earl Hines. 

Even if you did know that reasonably well-documented fact, 
you probably haven’t heard the story of Witherspoon sitting in 
with me on piano 25 years ago (ouch!) through a bizarre set of 
coincidences involving the late Cap’n Bob and a Californian 
lady who employed Jimmy’s mother as a domestic. What 
surprises me is that, with only one intervening reminder, he 
still remembers and jokes about “when I was a student at 
Oxford”. 

He was, in fact, already an established star with a rich 
baritone that could have easily specialised in ballads, but with 
a style and repertoire modelled on Kansas City favourites 
Walter Brown (whom he imitated in the 40s) and Big Joe 
Turner - “Joe Turner always was my idol”, he told me on our 
60s meeting. By then, Spoon had had a huge hit single, 
dropped into obscurity and bounced back a couple of times. 

The first comeback came through a song by Chicago blues 
mastermind Willie Dixon “When The Lights Go Out” (Dixon 
singing harmony, probably because Chess couldn’t yet do 
overdubbing); the second through an almost-didn’t-happen 
appearance at the Monterey Festival with backing from swing 
superstars including - wait for it - Roy Eldridge, Earl Hines, 
Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster. 

“I prefer to work with jazz musicians. ‘Cos they know what 
they’re doing. I never did come up with the Chicago type 
blues — not putting them down, I just never did. I was always 


Long ago and far away, 
Brian Priestley shared a 
stage with bluesman 
Jimmy Witherspoon. This 
time they share a 
tape-recorder. Richard 
Faulks snapped his hat. 

around Jay McShann, Ben Webster, Dizzy, Buck Clayton.” 
He has difficulty naming any younger players with that kind 
of individuality, eventually coming up with tenorman Clifford 
Jordan and putting in a special mention for Stan Tracey and 
Dick Morrissey, with whom- he worked and recorded (respec¬ 
tively) here in the 60s. I guessed that more recently he often 
has to use musicians ,who only know the blues. “No, I try to 
stay from that too, still. Robben Ford, who I discovered - he 
was with me for about four years — he’s not just a blues 
musician. But he can play the blues.” 

Ford has, you will recall, been associated with the Yellow- 
jackets and, for a time in the 80s, played with Miles Davis. 
And one of the most noticeable features of Spoon’s sophisti¬ 
cated style is comparable to Davis, namely his use of space. 
Especially when singing “straight" blues, there’s none of that 
textbook stuff about two bars vocal followed by two bars 
instrumental fill - Jimmy is capable of delaying his punchlines 
until it’s almost time for him to come in the next time , and 
backing musicians certainly need to know what they’re doing 
when he’s around. He even talks of sitting in with Miles being 
like a competition to see who could delay their phrasing the 

While he modestly traces this habit to an admiration 
for Billie Holiday, Spoon’s actual vocal quality comes from the 
church. “Only in church do I sing free - I don’t even sing in 
the bathtub, ’cos I don’t get paid!” As well as giving him his 
vocal start at the age of five, the church still involves him and 
he reminds me he did an album of spirituals at the same period 
as his Monterey set. Is there any conflict with the blues? “No, 
because I won’t put them together. My faith is my own 
personal thing, so I don’t get on stage and have a bunch of 


421WIRE 



drunks clapping out of time, like Mick Jagger or somebody. I 
wouldn't do damage to a spiritual song like that - it’s the same 
voice, but it's not the same meaning. Anybody who's in a 
nightclub will not hear me sing a spiritual song.” Jimmy’s 
announcement on the Monterey album that his mother was 
hearing him in public for the first time confirms that she 
refused to set foot inside a nightclub. “That was her belief and, 
if it carried her through, I can’t knock it.” 

What carries Spoon himself through, apart from his reli¬ 
gion, is a considerable strength of purpose. When I spoke to 
him, he should have had jet-lag but said simply: “You’ve got 
to put that out of your mind, otherwise you certainly will get 
it.” Eleven years ago he was taken ill while touring England, 
and diagnosed as having cancer of the throat, not the best news 
for a singer. Back in action for ages now, he is celebrating his 
69th birthday this month and has a new album out. Recorded 
here with Mike Vernon as producer, The Blues, The Whole Blues 
And Nothing But The Blues (Indigo) is both powerful and 
impressively laid-back. Jimmy is pleased with the record but 
what impresses him is the management, with a tour tied to the 


release date and with the same musicians on each gig: “This is 
the first time I’ve had a tour set up like this in my life. Other 
than with Eric Burdon and War, when we were all together.” 
And, of course, it was while signed with War’s management 
in the early 70s that Spoon recorded live with Robben Ford, 

both of those also produced by Mike Vernon. 

His very first hit back in '49, by the way, was “Ain’t 
Nobody’s Business What I Do”, and Jimmy will proudly tell 
any interviewer that it set a 34-week record on the R&B 
charts. What he doesn’t mention, or even perhaps realise, is 
that his success with an already 25-year-old song (penned by 
one of Bessie Smith’s piano-players) is what inspired Billie 
Holiday to do a cover version; only after this did it become a 
regular part of her repertoire. “Sooner Or Later”, one of two 
tunes on the new recording written by Vernon, refers to that 
landmark in the lines, Ain’t nobody’s business what Witherspoon 
has done!Took too many chances but sure had lots of fun. His 
comment on that couplet and the album: “That is Jimmy 
Witherspoon, it’s my life.” ■ 


431 WIRE 





Every month we test a musician with 
a series of records which they’re 
asked to comment on and 
mark out of five - with no prior 
knowledge of what it is they’re hearing. 


studied at Liverpool Ui 
Holland, under the tutelage of Dutch mini- 

ing in 1989 via his debut album for Factory 
Classical, while Babi YarlDrill provoked 

recently released two new albums for Factory: 
positions while Wolfgang sees him conduct- 

operatic arias. He will be a featured composer 
at the Helsinki Festival in August and 
Japan's Kyoto Festival in November. He is 

Andriessen for BBC TV, which will be 
shown late 92/early 93. 

Steve Martland was tested 
by Louise Gray 


1 N V 1 S 

1 B L E 


—★ STEVE MARTLAND * 

>- 

JUKE 

BOX 



44 SWIRE 







of Mary Of Egypt. In full view of e 
The next day, I said that he’d 
Protecting Veil. He said, “This is 


ic Orange". [Actually, it's ‘G\ 


Andriessen's De Stoat. He was my teacher 
and before studying with him, I hadn't heard 
this. So many of us have been influenced by 
him, and all the American new composers of 
my generation: Torke, David Lang, Michael 
Gordon, Jeff Brooks. We’re all fans. There’s 


Really? V 
For Michat 


accessible. The path has been laid by people 
like John Adams. Both he and Torke orches¬ 
trate quite brilliantly. They write this new- 




to play. It was played for th< 



MIRANDA SEX GARDEN 

“Gush Forth My Tears” (acappella ver¬ 
sion) (Mute 12"). 


they just cannot sing in tune. [. . .] They are 
truly appalling. I know Monteverdi and 


n things from De Stoat 
he tune. This should be 
i a fiendishly hard piece 


JOHN BULLER 

Theatre Of Memory” from Proenqa! 
Theatre Of Memory (Unicorn-Kanchana). 


language, let alone anything els 
cynical attempt to exploit the s 


DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH 

“Allegro Non Troppo” from Symphony 
No. 8 (Teldec). 

[Within seconds ] Shostakovich’s Eighth Sym¬ 
phony. This recording is very underplayed. 


BABY FORD 

“RU486" from BFord 9 (Transglobal/ 
Rhythm King). 


ss. [Pause] h coo 



all the trombones come in, i: 
reminds me of De Stoat. This ju 


ntinued on page 70 


451WIRE 




I Recorded sound from 

all around: George Coleman 
to George Lewis, Steve Martland 
to Stevie Wonder, Orange Juice 
to Jelly Roll Morton. 



His mission complete, space-provocateur Davis M39XZ set the controls for galaxies 
Picture: Andrew Pothecary. 



47SWIRE 









48SWIRE 









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49 SWIRE 




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55SWIRE 





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63 SWIRE 






64 SWIRE 



5SWIRE 







* I Steve Lacy, Eric Dolphy, Harold 



The Beats, John Russell. 

Chaloff, Loose Tubes, Paul Lytton 
& Paul Lovens, Frank Zappa. 

36 Steve Williamson, Phillip Bent, 



37 Bobby McFerrin, Hampton 
Hawes, Dirty Dozen Brass Band, 


Sheila Jordan, TaddDameron. 

40 Ornette Coleman, Charlie 



Rare 

AND 

Fine 


A complete collection of back 


definitely the time to fill in 


79 Jimi Hendrix, Don Cherry, Ray 


Art B/akey, Miles On Record-2, 
Joe Zawinul, Jason Rehello. 

*82183 Quincy Jones, Cecil Taylor, 


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Ralph Peterson, John Gilmore, 



*60 Andy Sheppard, Jack 78 Sun Ra, Frank Sinatra, Jon 

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Gurtu continued from page 29 


Joi continued from page 39 


Jimi Hendrix and Yes. He would practice with anything he 
could lay his hands on, playing in bands in high-class hotels 
simply to get hold of the drum kit. 

“It was the age of the hippies and all of that, and there was a 
lot happening in India, and I got into that whole rock and pop 
scene, with Hendrix and Cream and so on. I had to really 
search around to hear these records, but I grabbed anything I 
could get, and then somebody played me Coltrane, and from 
there I started hearing Miles and Cannonball and Monk. I 
loved that music, I felt I really wanted to learn about it as a 
way to express myself." 

Frustrated by the conservatism of the Indian jazz scene, 
Gurtu moved to Europe in 1973. He settled in Hamburg, 
where he began to play in all kinds of contexts, including a 
productive collaboration with another much-travelled musical 
eclectic — trumpeter Don Cherry. “Don taught me a lot about 
the African side of the music, and about Ornette.” As word 
spread, he began to get more and more calls for sessions, tours, 
and teaching. 

Gurtu’s unique kit is laid out around him in economical 
fashion on stage. It combines both Indian (tabla and dhol) and 
Western (snare, tom-tom, cymbals) elements, alongside a 
variety of “little instruments”, like African cowbells, tuned 
pans, temple blocks, birdcalls and the bucket of water in 
which he immerses a resonating gong. He also sings, often in 
the form of Indian vocal mnemonics (check the title track of 
McLaughlin’s Que Alegria), or a more abstract adaptation of 

“The kit evolved over a long period,” he says. “As I got a 
little money, I would add things to it. The snare drum helped 
me a lot, because it allowed me to express myself as a drummer 
as well as a percussionist. The water thing came from when I 
was playing with a percussion group in Germany, which used 
to play a lot of really out contemporary music. This particular 
thing came from a piece by John Cage, and I liked it, so I kept 

His arresting debut album Usfret was followed by the recent 
Living Magic, where he works with the likes of saxophonist Jan 
Garbarek and percussionist Nana Vasconcelos in a distinctly 
pan-cultural fusion. While often impressively inventive in its 
execution, the music suffers a little from an overly-diffuse 
focus, and is not as consistently absorbing to these ears as his 
work with Oregon or McLaughlin. 

CMP, he says, “take what I do very seriously. They have 
been behind me in these projects, and have never said, we 

ambitions to be a permanent band leader. He prefers a 
situation where “if I have an idea I really want to express, I can 
make something, but my only ambition is just to be honest 
with the music, and play it with the deepest love I can. ” ■ 


Hoxton Street. The night I went, the place was Filled with 
bonhomie - an amiably utopian vibe ruled. This was a space 
for experiment (DJs mixing dub bass with Qawaali treble, 
piano echo onto tabla reverb), an extension of the spirit of 
Joi-Bangla beyond the East End. A transvaluation was occur¬ 
ring. Just as it had with Soul II Soul at the Africa Centre in 
87—88, “minority” club culture was becoming a platform for a 
potentially limitless, commercially viable expression. In here, 
a reaffirmation of our mixed-up post-acid generation was 
taking flight, its launch pad this time Bengali culture. 
Outside the majority were, we knew, painfully limited in 
outlook, bound to their bodies and memories no matter what. 
As I came in, however, a large bouncer, black, was trying to 
stop one of Haroon’s friends coming in. “He’s come all the way 
from Bangladesh to be here!” exclaimed Haroon before the 
doorkeeper relented. 

It seems to me that the problem with the last three 
Summers of Love, with their 60s rerun, was that they were just 
too white. Any feeling of psychedelic dissolution, any weaken¬ 
ing of body-armour into such a sea of whiteness tends only to 
remind you - if black - of all you’re trying to forget. It puts 
the black back into your skin. 

Hence the release of being in a mixed, predominantly Asian 
crowd. The problem of talking up any New Wave is that it 
installs an amnesia above previous emergences; or else fixates 
Asian Pop as nothing but a series of threshold ventures. The 
Suns of Arqa in Manchester and Eastern Sher in Southall are 
two dub-influenced collectives who exist outside such terms, 
more independently than Nation Records. Playing outside 
Pop’s tempo gives you longevity — but you lose its shocks and 
thrills, its hunger. 

Apache Indian, signed to Island from the indie Sure 
Delight, is after three singles the most successful Pop entryist. 
The music which chose Apache is ragga - and unlike Joi’s 
relation to House, there appears to be no tension. Terms like 
“Bhangramuffin”, as well as the title of his forthcoming debut 
Don Raja , suggest an already-achieved, friction-free balance. 
Ragga also allows Apache to express and then reiterate his ruff, 
bad persona in a highly familiar way. 


In the end, Joi are more ambitious. Realising that 
House’s very drives are mantric, making it “Eastern” to the 
core, they won’t simply settle for a chart position. Their aim is 
to entirely reverse the polarities of East/West value. They will 
arrive as the real thing, the first Asian Pop Gods, the centre 
round which older fragments of Asian derivation will from 
now on orbit forlornly. The Orb, Primal Scream, Boy George, 
whoever rules the West this week, will be revealed as mortals, 
their only purpose to announce those who are coming to wipe 
them out. ■ 


77SWIRE 






CLASSIFIED 


NEW CASSETTE LABEL: from 


RANT.. 54 Phoebe Street, T 


DISCUS: Stock clearance ofHORNWEB, 
FEETPACKETS, and MARTIN ARCHER 
CDs and IPs at astonishing prices. For 

mLs, Sheffield* 

WANTED: modem and contemporary jazz 
records especially European artists. Send your lists 
specifying conditions, editions and price. I also 
have to offer unissued tapes of avant-garde music 
coming from Italian concerts in the late 10’slearly 
80's. Write for list. StefaneGidari, Via della 
Palancola 5, 50133 Firenze, Italy. 

MESSAGE: Novice Guitarist seeks others to form 

Techno. Must be keen, and willing to play in any 
field of music. Contact: Sacha 081-656-0647. 
South London area. 

POETRY/JAZZ LPS B Y Kenneth Rexroth, 
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jayne Cortez, Kenneth 
Patchen, Amiri Baraka, Brian Patten, Henri 
Chopin, KenNordine. Alan Ginsberg and others. 

Leamington Spa CV31 IDF. 


NO REASONABLE OFFER refused for 
complete run (issues 1 to 98) of “The Wire" in 
good, clean condition. Jim Allen, 48 Ambrose 
Road, Tadley, Hants. RG26 6JS 


LOOKING FOR WIRE issues 2 through 7. 
Can trade mint Wires #16-17, 25-27, 29- 
30, and old downbeats. (Chertok, 1 South 
Franklin St, Nyack, New York, 10960 


JAZZ LPS WANTED IN FIRST CLASS 
CONDITION: Shannon Jackson, Barbecue Dog 
(Antilles):James Blood Ulmer, Are You Glad? 

(Artists House) + Part Time (etc.) (Rough 
Trade); Cecil Taylor, FlyX5 (MPS); Derek 
Bailey, Yankees (Celluloid);Julius Hemphill . 
Dogon AD (Artista); John Carter, Castles of 
Ghana (Gramavision); James Newton, If Love 

(Soulnote); Adams!Pullen. Lifeline + City Gales 
(Timeless); Billy Bang, Changing Seasons 
(Bellows); Cecil McBee, Alternate Spaces (India 
Navigation); AllanJaffe, Soundscape (Krrmiel); 

Quartett Live At Moos (Ring); ASKING 
PRICES TO:JIM ASHTON, 6 BAYVIEW 
ROAD, TAKAPUNA, AUCKLAND 1309. 
NEW ZEALAND. 


WANTED: A ny condition - Mike Gibbs ‘Just 
Ahead"; Mike Westbrook “Celebration", 

Kenny Wheeler “Windmill Tilter"; any LPs by 
Mike Taylor, New Jazz Orchestra. Call Chris on 

FOR SALE: Issues of‘The Wire 1-19. Offers to 
Steve 071-708 1248. 




INDOOR VENUE 



jor legal rave. 




COMPLETE RUN of‘The Win for sale. 4 ny 
offers? Also copies of other jazz magazines from the 
1970s and 1980s. Please send requirements and 
offers to Tom Drains Divan, 3 Bittacy Rise, 



ROOM TO LET in large, friendly flat in North 
London, 10 mins from Highbury and Islington 

“INVENTION is an explosive orgasm. 
Revivalism is no more than safe sex" - Billy 

DO YOU RUN Jare you an artist on an 
INDUSTRIAL/EXPERIMENTAL label? Fed 
up with receiving no airplay? Moan no more; new 
Manchester radio station MCR presents 
STEELWERKS, covering complete history of the 
genre- TG, Can etc to Nitzer Ebb, Ministry via 
Wire! Steelwerks is already linked to major labels 

contact I send product to Richard Smith, 2. Vale 
Close, Dronfield, Sheffield, SI8 6SF, tel. 0246 


MORGANA KING L.P. Wanted, ‘Sings Helen 
Morgen’- Wing 60007. plvj other rare 

etc. Details please to: Frank Harris, 106 Charles 
Street, Higher Hillgate, Stockport, SKI 3JT. 



CLASSIFIED 





CLASSIFIED 


JAZZ DRUMMER into Colt,-am. Coleman. 

seeks to join!form band with musicians of similar 
interests. David071 382 3732. 

WANTED: Tape copy of John Scofield!Mike 
Gibbs Band-Radio 3 broadcast, transmitted 

Bond, Thrnen, Spedding, Marshall)-Radio l 
In Concert August 1971. Call Chris on 071 623 


BILLY JENKINS 

The Cassette Collection 
Aural Paperbacks with a hardback feel. 
Wood Wharf Studios 
Horseferry Place, London SE10 9BT 


SINGLE WHITE MALE 38, Jazz fan and a 
Bill Zimprich 1114 N. Marshal!#404 


THE DRUM MACHINE Plays the 
battlemarch of consumerism" - BILLYJENKINS 


FLAT TO LET, LONDON NI7 AREA 

Large, luxury, purpost built, one-bedroom 
apartment. Furnished and decorated to 

swags'n’tails, large tilt!turn picture frame 

off-street parking, garage facility. Mainline! 
tube station nearby. TenancyJan'93 onwards. 
£160p.w. 081-883 3310, professionals . 
only please. 


C L A 


FOR SALE: WIRE issues 1-20 complete; 
CODA, 19 issues between 133 (Nov. 1974) and 
160 (April 1978). Also some other jazz titles, 
Jazz and Blues. Blues Unlimiteds, some books, 
records and CDs. Sae. for more details or with 
offers for Wiresl Codas. WANTED: 
FOOTNOTE magazines and CDs of all sorts of 


STEREO WANTED: Tuner, amp, turntable, 
cassette deck and CD player. Cash waiting. Call 
Roy on 071 439 6422 

JAZZ MAGAZINES sale. Wire!Downbeat! 

Whelpton, 8 Erroll Road, Hove, E. SusL BN3 
4QG. 



S S I F I E D 












JSWIRE 






WEAR A WIRE T-SHIRT 
AND DRESS LIKE A 
^ YOUNG GOD 


self-esteem 


black, regular: £11.95 including postage and p 
black, long-sleeved: £15.95 including postage 
: add an extra £2.00. 


shake).